Richard Dawkins speaks out on his child molestation comments.
Without my own comments, I'll just post his article.
http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/9/11/child-abuse-a-misunderstanding
by Richard Dawkins posted on September 12, 2013 02:40PM GMT
A is bad. B is worse.” How dare you defend A?
Anon: epitome of several Twitter attacks.
In my memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, I wrote the following, about an incident at boarding school.
I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day – I must have been about eleven – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.
This paragraph, together with a subsequent statement to the Times that I would not judge that teacher by the standards of today, has been heavily criticised. These criticisms represent a misunderstanding, which I would like to clear up.
The standards of today are conditioned by our increasing familiarity with the traumatising effect that pedophile abuse can have on children, sometimes scarring them psychologically for life. Today we read, almost daily, of adults whose childhood was blighted by an uncle perhaps, or even a parent, who would day after day, week after week, year after year, sexually abuse a vulnerable child. The child would often have no escape, would not be believed if he/she told the other parent, or told a teacher. In many cases it is only now, when the abused children have reached adulthood, that these stories are coming out. To make light of their stories, even after all these years, might in some cases re-awaken the trauma of not being believed at the time when it was all happening, and when being believed would have meant so much to the child.
Only slightly less culpable than the abusers themselves are the institutions that protected them, of which the most prominent examples are to be found in the senior hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This is why I personally donated £10,000 of my own money towards a fund, instigated by Christopher Hitchens and me, to build the legal case for prosecuting Pope Benedict XVI for his part (when Cardinal Ratzinger) in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Our initiative, for which I paid 50%, the rest being raised by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, resulted in the book The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, in which the distinguished barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC laid out the case for the prosecution should any jurisdiction in the world choose to take it up in the future.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Facts have NO PLACE in a thread about Richard Dawkins. Those individuals who are unnerved by his arguments against religion and can't answer them have no other choice but to slander his character, and as we see in this group time and time again. They'll make shit up if necessary, because I guess in their minds the ends justify the means.
So we get things like:
Dawkins says being propositioned in an elevator isn't as bad as FGM? ZOMG, Dawkins is a horrible misogynist and thinks that rape is OK!
Dawkins says he doesn't think he or his friends suffered long-term harm from an isolated incident? ZOMG, he is excusing child rape for everyone at all times!
Forgot this one: Dawkins says that being told one's friends will burn in hell in eternity is child abuse? ZOMG, he just said that teaching your child about religion is child abuse - what a bigot!
Lather, rinse, repeat. 